Chapter 28. Affecting the pace of change
I’m in a lucky and rare position to have been with the same team for more than 10 years (more than half of the original team remains, although we are all greatly changed). In that time, we’ve come from chaos to self-organizing—the team is happy and effective and constantly challenges the status quo. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved. I think our only regret is we didn’t get there faster. Luckily, you’ve got the wisdom in this book to help you achieve that.
Why so long?
Ten years is a long time, more time than most teams get to become effective before they are outsourced. Why did it take so long? Agile development is all about shortening feedback loops. Perhaps, if we’d done feedback more aggressively, it might have helped, but on the other hand, too much feedback too soon can be overwhelming, causing anxiety and building walls. To facilitate change as a leader, you need to learn techniques to encourage others to adopt change while remaining a happy and effective team.
Team-based ideas
Ideas for change should come from within the team as well as from you. They come from reflection on what’s not right, and inspiration from other teams. Encourage the team to network at user groups, read blogs, and use Twitter and other social media. These resources make a huge difference to a team’s enthusiasm for change.
Consensus
For change to be successfully adopted, a team needs to have consensus. As a team lead, it’s your job to ensure consensus is built; retrospectives, stand-ups, or spontaneous chats are where it happens. Ensure these happen when necessary and are done in environments conducive to constructive dialogue. If you want to run these well, it’s worth learning facilitation techniques from books like Jean Tabaka’s Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2006).
Personalities
Your team will undoubtedly comprise different personality types. Some will focus on getting things done, some will look at the details, and some will find creative solutions to difficult problems. This will cause tension. In the early days, the tension creates anxiety and frustration, but as collaboration improves, this tension contributes to effectiveness. The key to making this transition is to encourage the team to value each other’s strengths and understand that, combined, these strengths will help each member to become stronger.
Conflict
If you’re continually improving, there will be conflict. If there isn’t, it’s a good warning sign that you’re stagnating. It’s important to every team member that they’re respected for being competent at their job. New ideas that challenge the way they currently work have the potential to challenge their feeling of competence, leading to embarrassment. Our brains put up strong defenses to avoid this, particularly at first. Don’t become frustrated; be sensitive, but don’t let defensiveness stop you.
Barricades
If a discussion starts going in circles with multiple people pushing their opinions and you can’t see a way out, draw the meeting to a close. Don’t be despondent, and look to find out why. Take time to talk to people individually, but remain their equal in the conversation. Look at the work of Chris Argyris to ensure you get the most out of these conversations (check out the resources section on Benjamin Mitchell’s blog at http://blog.benjaminm.net/argyris/). Ask questions, and spend as much time inquiring into their cause as you do in advocating yours. If it doesn’t work, give it another day or two and talk again. In advocating your cause, explain the evidence that backs up the need to change, and explain and question your assumptions. When trying to understand their point of view, try to find out the evidence and assumptions they used to reach their conclusions. With practice, you can use these techniques during the first meeting.
Pace
Attempt to find a pace of change that doesn’t cause anxiety to team members. Using the discussed techniques can make change faster and smoother. Don’t become disheartened; change takes time. Give others time, but ensure you are helping the process as much as you can.
Roy’s analysis
One idea that this note touches on, that’s covered somewhat in chapter 4, is pace. At what pace do we want change to occur? Do we always want change to happen quickly? Is there a downside to that?
The note demonstrates several levers you can pull to move things along—to increase pace. But taking longer to make changes isn’t always a bad idea. Too many changes in parallel can create an environment that feels unstable. If you’re dealing with people who’ve been in the same place for 10 or 20 years, this could be too disruptive, and you might lose some good people.
In other organizations, a fast pace of change might be a great idea, and there’s no time like the present. Either way, considering pace might be something you want to plan as a change agent in your organization.
The author claims that consensus is needed for change to happen. I’d say, “Yes, sometimes.” It depends on the current mode the team is in. In survival mode, the team might not be a part of the decision-making process when changes are necessary. In fact, sometimes teams in survival mode don’t even know what the right decision might be. That’s how they got into survival mode. When the team is in learning mode, you might want to push them to try to get consensus, but only as part of a learning exercise—“How do we get consensus among ourselves as a team of peers?” Not all decisions will be greeted with acceptance. As an Israeli, I can tell you any decision that doesn’t have at least two dissenters in a team of eight people isn’t a meaningful decision. Conflict is important.
On the other hand, everyone needs to be heard. Then a decision can be made, even if everyone’s not on board. People who have been heard can feel committed to do things they don’t agree with, as long as they said everything they wanted to say, and they know it was considered. As long as you end up with “We considered this feedback, and we’re going to go with X anyway,” people can still follow the decision.
Perhaps partial consensus might be a better fit in some situations. Remember that learning mode is about getting out of your comfort zone, and that sometimes means executing decisions you’re not comfortable with. I sometimes tell new team leads, “If everyone’s happy in your team all the time, you’re doing something wrong. You’re not pushing anyone out of their comfort zone.” Perhaps a lack of consensus is a sign of a learning team. As the note said, conflict is good. Don’t expect to be able to fix all conflicts.
The last part of the note deals with barricading. Trying to convince a team member of something they disagree with can be frustrating. This is where the six influence forces come in handy.
Usually we only look at personal motivation and personal ability. Can I explain logically why this is a good idea? Can the team physically follow the idea? With the influence forces, we can look at four more possible reasons why that person isn’t on board with our ideas for change. Maybe the company reward system rewards the opposite behavior. Maybe people they respect do the opposite of what we propose.
Time to research!
TOM HOWLETT has been developing web applications using Microsoft technologies for the last 15 years with a particular enthusiasm for Agile principles, Scrum, and Kanban. He spent the last 5 years as a Scrum master and enjoys blogging about the experience here: http://diaryofascrummaster.wordpress.com.